1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a video-attribute-information output apparatus, a video digest forming apparatus, a computer program product, and a video-attribute-information output method.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the recent advancement of the information infrastructure of multi-channel broadcasting, a large amount of video contents has been distributed. On the video recorder side, because the widespread use of hard disk recorders and personal computers equipped with a tuner enables video contents to be recorded as digital data, the contents can be viewed in various manners.
The manners of viewing on a video recorder include a video digest technique, with which a long video program can be shortened into digest form. For instance, JP-A 2005-109566 (KOKAI) describes a method of making a digest of a sports commentary program, with which scenes are extracted from a metadata-added video picture in accordance with the user's preference, thereby obtaining a digest. The metadata may be input as events of individual players' plays in the game, together with time information thereof, and the metadata needs to be manually input while referring to the video picture.
JP-A 2000-132563 (KOKAI) describes a method of assisting in metadata inputting. In particular, an image region for displaying information such as the inning and score (score information area) in a baseball game broadcast is designated and entered as a key image. When it is determined that a rate of change in the key image exceeds a certain standard level upon an event such as the end of inning, the image of this moment is displayed.
According to the method of JP-A 2005-109566 (KOKAI), however, while the use of metadata necessary for digest formation has improved the accuracy of the summary, a problem of labor and costs arises because all the metadata has to be manually input.
The technique of JP-A 2000-132563 (KOKAI) may save some of the labor of inputting metadata for a baseball game broadcast.
However, with the technique of JP-A 2000-132563 (KOKAI), the image region for displaying inning and score information still needs to be manually designated, and images detected as events also have to be manually read in. Thus, the problem of labor for the manual designation of an image region for each program and labor and costs for the manual input of detected innings and scores is yet to be solved.